only emoluments but work--and he resumed his literary labours, wrote a
pamphlet on the ‘Instincts and Habitual Tastes of Man,’ a comic opera,
to Paisiello’s music, called ‘The Imaginary Socrates,’ and another most
amusing pamphlet, written in a single night, to distract the Neapolitans
from their fright on the eruption of Vesuvius in 1779.
In 1781 he visited Rome, and was courted by all the great people; and
when he came home Naples gave him another rich abbey and another most
lucrative civil appointment. He was still a comparatively young man.
Fortune had overturned her horn at his feet. ‘The torment of all things
accomplished, the plague of nought to desire,’ might well have been
Galiani’s. But he had the rare power of finding happiness where it most
often hides--in small and common things. The monkey which had amused his
leisure he had replaced by a couple of cats, and it afforded him
infinite amusement to watch their gambols and their habits, and write
long dissertations on the natural history of the animal to Madame
d’Épinay in Paris.
His friendship with her had lasted without break or blot for nearly
five-and-twenty years. If happiness meant only exemption from suffering,
then well for Galiani that no woman ever held his heart more nearly than
this light, bright, irresponsible little person. But that side of
existence which brings the deepest sorrow brings too the highest joy,
and who is spared the first, misses the second. Madame Daubinière had
touched neither his soul nor his life; Madame d’Épinay only aroused a
capacity for a friendship which, as he loved no one, had certainly
assumed some of the absorption of a passion. When she died in 1783, he
stood in the presence of a great and a most genuine sorrow. She had
represented the Paris he would see no more; to answer her letters had
been a large occupation in his life--and she was dead! He turned to his
work as his last hope, to the one means that was left of making life
endurable. In 1785 he was attacked by apoplexy, and two years later he
travelled for his health. But it was not improved. ‘The dead are so
bored,’ he said in his old jesting manner; ‘they have asked me to come
and cheer them a little.’
In the October of 1787 the King and Queen of Naples commanded him to
meet them at Portici. He went, but he was long past receiving pleasure
from such honours. The Sovereigns were struck with his altered
appearance, and begged him to consult a doctor. Queen Caroline wrote him
a letter imploring him to renounce his scepticism and make ready for
heaven. He answered with dignity and respect; but no physician for
either the soul or the body could aid him now. He kept his gaiety to the
last. As he had loved in life to be surrounded by friends, they were
about his deathbed. He declared to them that he felt no sorrow in dying,
save that he would fain have lived to publish his book on Horace. The
night before his death Gatti, his friend and doctor, told him he had
refused an invitation to the opera from the Ambassador of France to be
near his friend. ‘Ah,’ says Galiani, ‘you still look on me as Harlequin?
Well, perhaps I shall prove more amusing than the opera.’ And he did.
Two hours before his death General Acton, the Prime Minister, called to
see him. ‘Tell his Excellency I cannot receive him. My carriage is at
the door. Warn him to prepare his own.’
He died on October 30, 1787, aged nearly fifty-nine.
Dagonet, King’s Fool at Arthur’s Court, could not avert his master’s
ruin, but, noblest of all Fools, he tried. Galiani, with his laughing
bells jingling in those ‘Dialogues,’ spoke his message in jests and
could not help starving France, nor even postpone by an hour the raid on
the bakers’ shops in the Faubourg St. Antoine. But he, too, did his
best.
IV
_VAUVENARGUES: THE APHORIST_
The proverb is indigenous to Spain, verse to Italy, and the aphorism to
France. In that form of speech in which, in Vauvenargues’ own words, La
Rochefoucauld had ‘turned men from virtue by persuading them that it is
never genuine,’ Vauvenargues vindicated human goodness, showed man that
the best way to reform the world is to reform himself, and taught him
how to use the freedom Voltaire gave him.
In his delicate thoughtfulness, in his conviction that man’s happiness
depends upon his character and not upon his circumstances, in his
mistrust of the cold god, Reason, and his belief in the soundness of the
intuitions of the heart, Vauvenargues stands alone among his compeers.
He stands alone, too, among them in his personal nearness to Voltaire’s
affections. The noblest testimony to Vauvenargues’ character is that it
compelled the reverence of him who reverenced
[Illustration: LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES.
_From a Print in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris._]
nothing; and the finest compliment ever paid to Voltaire was to be loved
by a Vauvenargues.
Born on August 6, 1715, at Aix in Provence--in a mean house which still
stands and is to-day a grocer’s shop--Luc de Vauvenargues came of a poor
family of provincial _noblesse_ and was from the first what he remained
to the last, delicate in constitution and with limited prospects of
worldly success.
His very imperfect education he received at the College of Aix, where
his small Latin and less Greek were frequently interrupted by ill
health. But he had a possession which is in itself an education--a good
father.
Joseph de Clapiers had been created Marquis de Vauvenargues in 1722,
when Luc was seven years old, for having been the only magistrate in Aix
who did not run away from the place and his duty when a pestilence
devastated the countryside in 1720.
For companions, Luc had two younger brothers and a cousin of his own
age, a coarse, clever, selfish, undisciplined boy, named Victor Riquetti
Mirabeau, who was to become the ‘crabbed old Friend of Men’ and the
great father of a greater son. The boys had little in common but genius,
and were attracted to each other by their very unlikeness. At sixteen,
Luc was reading with passionate transport that ‘splendid painting of
virtue’ ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ (in a translation) and then the letters of
Brutus to Caesar, ‘so filled with dignity, loftiness, passion, and
courage,’ said he, ‘that I never could read them calmly.’ Victor had
already plunged into that blusterous, incontinent life which was to
bring ruin to his own family and quite spoil the effect of his
loud-voiced schemes for the good of mankind.
When both were seventeen the pair parted for a while. Luc must choose
one of the only two professions open to his caste--the Church or the
Army. The Church would not do, because, boy though he was, he was
already philosopher and thinker--ay, in the noblest sense of the
word--free-thinker too. Then it must be the Army! Picture this new
subaltern of the King’s Own Regiment, in the loveliest pale grey
uniform, faced with Royal blue, with the most splendid braidings, and
the very buttonholes sewn with gold silk, with his tall, boyish figure,
his handsome face, his ‘proud and pensive grace’--for all the world like
the soldier-hero of a woman’s novel. But he was already something very
different from that. The handsome face bespoke a noble nature, ambitious
for all great things, strong and ready to begin the world, to play his
part therein if it be the part of a man of Deeds alone--or if the Deeds
be but foundation for the Thoughts.
His first campaign was in Italy in 1733 with Marshal Villars, who was on
his last. Italy! the land of dreams! The boy was filled with splendid
visions of following Hannibal across the mountains--with young sanguine
hopes of gloriously doing his duty and meeting immediate, glorious
rewards. For three years he knew the intoxication--and the horrors--of a
victorious campaign. And then of a sudden he found himself condemned at
one-and-twenty to the vicious idleness, the low pleasures, and the
deadening routine of a garrison life. The rich officers were of course
drawn by that magnet, the Court, to keep up their military studies and
prepare for the next war by dancing attendance on women and flattering
the Minister and the King at Versailles. The poor ones remained on
duty--with not enough of it to keep them out of mischief, and with, for
the most part, debased tastes, because their intellectual limitations
precluded them from higher.
The contamination of that useless existence even a Vauvenargues did not
wholly escape. For a brief while he was as other men are. But the
pleasures of a garrison town could not long hold such a nature as his.
Already--he was but twenty-two--he had that love of solitude which,
says a great German philosopher, is welcomed or avoided as a man’s
personal value is great or small. Already--at an age when other men
scarcely realise they have a soul--this man was dominated by the idea of
its value and dignity; and deep within him was the passion and
resolution to exercise to the full its powers and possibilities.
With his companions he was wholly simple, natural, and friendly--without
the faintest taint of that conscious superiority which makes many good
people at once useless as a moral influence and objectionable as
companions. ‘Father,’ his brother officers used to call him. Marmontel
said ‘he held all our souls in his hands.’ He soon resumed, by
correspondence, his friendship with Victor Mirabeau; and in their
discussions on love--the view he takes of this passion is always a sure
test of a man’s character--each letter-writer showed the yawning gulf
that divided him from the other.
If Vauvenargues ever met the woman worthy to hold his heart, to be, in
the finest and highest understanding of those words, his companion and
completion, is not known. He writes of love as if he had felt it. But to
some pure souls--as to a Milton and a St. John the Divine--are revealed
in visions the Eden and the New Jerusalem wherein they never walked.
Vauvenargues’ letters to Mirabeau treat of the subject with such an
exquisite dignity and refinement--with such noble silences--that there
is at least no doubt that if he never found the woman who would have
realised his ideals, he was spared the bitterness of loving one who
broke them.
Cousin Victor easily perceived that this thoughtful young soldier was
fitted for something widely different from the life of a garrison town.
Come up to Paris, then! Take up letters as a career! Win the smiles of
the Court, and a pension from the Privy Purse! But Vauvenargues not only
preferred literature to the sham called literary fame, but he loved his
own profession.
Thinker as nature had made him, thinker, moralist, aphorist as he has
come down the ages, he was first of all a man of action, and so sound in
thought because he was so strong in deeds. All his maxims were ‘hewn
from life.’ When the death of the Emperor Charles VI. in 1740 shook the
kingdoms of Europe as a child shakes its marbles in a bag, Luc de
Vauvenargues shouldered his knapsack and went out to Bohemia under the
command of Belle-Isle. Ready to dare and to do, brave, young,
high-spirited, knowing no career more glorious than arms, he looked
round him and drew from keen experience his views of the world.
The philosopher in a study, weighing the _pros_ and _cons_ of motives he
knows by hearsay, of deeds of which he has read, of passions he has
never felt, may be a very fine thinker, but will hardly be chosen as a
sound guide to practice.
The explorer who has faced the torrent and the mountain, the burning sun
of the desert, hunger and cold and thirst, who has himself fought with
beasts at Ephesus, will have a knowledge of the country he has
discovered, which no books and lectures, no geographical or
topographical knowledge can ever give to the cleverest student at home.
The worth and the use of Vauvenargues’ axioms on life lie largely in the
fact that _he had been there himself_.
The very brief triumph of the capture of Prague in 1742 was succeeded by
the horrors of the great mid-winter march from Prague to Egra. The
King’s Own suffered terribly. Death, defeat, famine, Vauvenargues knew
not as names but as realities. In the spring of 1742 he had lost a young
comrade, de Seytres, and wrote an _éloge_ of him. Its immature and
stilted style gives little idea of the warm feeling it clothed. Morley
speaks of Vauvenargues’ ‘patient sweetness and equanimity’ as a friend;
and records how hardship made him ‘not sour,’ but wise and tender. All
through that fearful march, in this strange soldier’s knapsack were the
manuscripts of ‘Discourses on Fame and Pleasure,’ ‘Counsels to a Young
Man,’ and a ‘Meditation on Faith.’ Of many of his maxims on patience and
the brave endurance of suffering, he must have found at this time cruel
personal need.
The handsome young officer who had left France in the prime of his hopes
and his manhood, returned to it with his health utterly ruined, both his
legs frost-bitten, and his lungs seriously affected.
Still, he gathered together the strength he had left him and the pluck
that never failed him, rejoined his regiment in Germany in 1743, fought
nobly for his fallen cause at Dettingen, and returned to the garrison of
Arras at the end of the year, an invalid for life.
It was now obvious he could no longer pursue his calling. Though he
wrote with a keen and bitter truth that courage had come to be regarded
as a popular delusion, patriotism as a prejudice, and that ‘one sees in
the army only disgust, _ennui_, neglect, murmuring; luxury and
effeminacy have produced the same effrontery as peace; and those who
should, from their position, arrest the progress of the evil, encourage
it by their example,’ yet still he would, if he could, have been soldier
to the end. For a time he thought of diplomacy. ‘Great positions soon
teach great minds,’ was one of his axioms. He would have been well
fitted. But merit was not of the slightest help to advancement. To fawn
on the King and the Mistress, to prostitute one’s life and one’s talents
to a Court--here was the way to promotion. Vauvenargues wrote to the
King and corresponded with Amelot the Minister, who answered most
amiably and affably--and did nothing at all. ‘Permit me, sir,’ wrote
Vauvenargues to him at last, with the directness taught in camps, ‘to
assure you that it is a moral impossibility for a gentleman, with
nothing but zeal to commend him, ever to reach the King.’ Amelot, stung
a little, promised the next vacant post, and this time promised
sincerely.
Vauvenargues retired to Provence and to quiet, to learn his new
business. There he was attacked by confluent small-pox, which left him
nearly blind and wholly disfigured: a misfortune he felt painfully as
‘one of those accidents which prevent the soul from showing itself.’ But
worse than any disfigurement, the partial blindness made, of course, a
diplomatic career an impossibility for ever.
Before the campaign of 1743, Vauvenargues had introduced himself to
Arouet de Voltaire, by a letter in which the obscure soldier-critic
compared Corneille disadvantageously with Racine. Nothing is so
delightful in Voltaire’s own genius as his generous recognition of other
men’s. Nothing is more to his honour than his high admiration for the
moral gifts of a Vauvenargues who was young enough to be his son, who
was poor, forlorn, a nobody, and whose fine qualities of lofty
highmindedness, delicacy, patience and serenity found, alas! no
counterpart in Voltaire’s own nature. It is so much the more to his
credit that he could admire what he could never imitate, and appreciate
what was wholly foreign to his temperament. He rejoiced in the
thoughtful ability of that letter. ‘It is the part of such a man as
you,’ he replied, ‘to have preferences but no exclusions.’
The campaign of 1743 had interrupted their relationship. But they
resumed it now, and, behold! it had turned into friendship.
Voltaire was at this time fifty years old, famous as the author of the
‘English Letters,’ the ‘Henriade,’ a few brilliant plays, and also as
Court wit and versifier. But he was already in mental attitude what he
had not yet become in mental output and in active deed. He could
recognise in this Vauvenargues not only a friend and a literary critic,
but a thinker and a philosopher. Vauvenargues sent him by degrees most
of his writings, and Voltaire’s criticisms thereon, as sincere as they
were enthusiastic, were in themselves a powerful persuasion to the man
of deeds to become man of words; while the Master’s whole-hearted
devotion to his own profession--the best and the noblest of all, though
it bring no bread but the bread of affliction and of tears--was a
further strong inducement to Vauvenargues to join the great brotherhood
too. This soldier-thinker can tell men what to do when we have made them
free to do what they will! He is, he has confessed it, as ‘follement
amoureux de la liberté’ as I myself! To the individual soul he can give
the help and the courage I have tried to give to the race, and to the
riddle of the painful earth he can bring a wiser, tenderer, and braver
solution than mine!
Vauvenargues was not, in fact, an intellect a Voltaire would lose. The
young soldier decided to adopt literature as a profession, and began the
world afresh.
Everything, save only Voltaire’s encouragement, was against such a
decision. The old Marquis de Vauvenargues--from a very natural but very
mistaken and unrobust tenderness--would have kept his son at home to
lead a safe, idle, invalid life in Provence, with a stroll on the
terrace of the Vauvenargues’ country-house for exercise, a thick-headed
provincial neighbour for mental recreation, and his own aches and pains
for an interest. His other relations (on the principle of Myrtle in ‘The
Conscious Lovers’--‘We never had one of _our_ Family before that
descended from Persons that Did anything’) objected to letters for one
of Us as a low walk, leading directly to the Bastille. It _was_ true
that the moment was an inglorious one for literature. The Encyclopædia
was unconceived. Voltaire himself was not yet the mighty influence he
was to become. Writing _did_ pay badly, and the young Marquis was deadly
poor. Greatest objection of all was his own strong leaning to a life of
action, and he himself first wrote of literature as being as ‘repugnant’
to him as to his family. ‘But necessity knows no law.’
That momentary bitterness passed. ‘Despair is the worst of faults,’ said
he. It was his part--allotted to him by misfortune, by fate, by God--no
longer to act himself, but to teach other men how to act. He thrust
aside the objections of his relatives. ‘It is better to derogate from
one’s caste than from one’s genius.’ He silenced his own disappointment.
‘A great soul loves to fight against ill fortune ... and the battle
pleases him, independently of the victory.’
In May, 1745, he came up to Paris, and in a very humble lodging, where
the Rue Larrey and the School of Medicine are now situated, began the
world afresh.
Anyone who supposes his discontent to come from his circumstances and
not from himself, should consider the life of Vauvenargues, and the one
book with which he has enriched humanity.
Disappointed, disfigured, a failure; useless for the career he had
loved, incapable of the career he had tried; cast off by his own people;
solitary in a great city; often in pain of body, and because the work he
had chosen was not the work Nature had originally chosen for him, often
in pain of mind too--if ever man had an excuse for cursing God and fate,
it was surely Luc de Vauvenargues.
La Rochefoucauld, rich and prosperous, with friends, position, and
honour, had denied human virtue, and assailed it with cold malignities
which still strike despair into the soul; and Voltaire himself, the most
successful man of letters in history, turned upon life with gibes, and
sneered at faith and happiness as alike chimæras.
But Vauvenargues looked out on the world which had given him nothing,
with serene and patient eyes, and in a single book, as direct, strong,
and simple as his own nature, evolved one of the most wise and
comforting, one of the most sane, serene, and practical schemes of
life, given to our race.
The great questions, Why am I? Whither go I? Whence came I? he asked
himself as a thoughtful man must, but being a doer long before he was a
thinker, he wasted little time in vainly seeking to answer them. Among
his papers are a Prayer as well as the ‘Meditation.’ For simple faith he
had ever reverence and envy--for all solemn questions a deep respect;
and though he had no formulated religion, was yet deeply religious. But
with him to be religious meant to Do Well. Live this life aright, and
the next will take care of itself. ‘The thought of death deceives us, it
makes us forget to live: one must live as if one would never die.’ To
waste time and energy in idle discussion and speculation on another
world when there is so much to do to set this one straight, found no
countenance from this man of Deeds. Do, not dream, was his motto for
ever.
There is not a page in his book--there is scarcely a line--which does
not bear witness to his strong faith in men’s honour and goodness, to
his passionate conviction that out of worst evil one can get good, that
the cruellest misfortunes ennoble and purify if one will let them, and
our griefs may be for ever our gains. The hand that wrote was fevered
with disease. No rich man, this, announcing glibly how comfortable it
is to be poor. In the most vicious of all ages--and in not the least
vicious of that age’s environments--Vauvenargues had preserved his high
ideals and his lofty character, and in sickness, sorrow, and
disappointment he practised daily the courage he preached.
Instead of mockery--the besetting sin of his generation--this man, and
this man alone, had for men’s follies and absurdities only infinite
compassion. Of him has been aptly quoted Bacon’s beautiful phrase, ‘he
had an aspect as though he pitied men.’ His philosophy remains for ever
to the unquiet heart at once balm and tonic--the cool hand of compassion
on the burning forehead--the touch of a friend, who knows--the strong
grasp of help to raise the feeble from his weakness and despair, and to
make him do what he can.
Some of the axioms have become part of men’s speech, if not part of
their soul.
‘Great thoughts come from the heart.’
‘We should comfort ourselves for not having fine talents, as we comfort
ourselves for not having fine positions; we can be above both by the
heart.’
‘Great men undertake great things because they are great, and fools
because they think them easy.’
‘Would you say great things? Then first accustom yourself never to say
false ones.’
‘Who can bear all, can dare all.’
‘Envy is confessed inferiority.’
‘Few sorrows are without remedy: despair is more deceptive than hope.’
‘Who gives his word lightly, breaks it.’
‘He who has great feeling, knows much.’
‘To the passions one owes the best things of the mind.’
Into that mad devotion to wit which was the snare of all his compeers,
Vauvenargues never fell. He worshipped at the shrine of a diviner
goddess called Truth. There is not a single example--even in his maxims,
when the temptation would naturally be strongest--of his sacrificing
fidelity to smartness.
In February 1746, after he had been less than a year in Paris, he
published anonymously that book by which he has gone down the ages and
up to the gods, and which contains only the ‘Introduction to the
Knowledge of the Human Mind,’ some ‘Reflections,’ the ‘Counsels to a
Young Man,’ a few critical articles, the ‘Meditation on Faith,’ and the
‘Maxims.’
Clear, clean, and vigorous in style, as sharp and brief as a military
order--it was well said by a friend that its author ‘wanted first of all
to get along quickly and drag little baggage after him;’ and better
said by himself that, ‘when an idea will not bear a simple form of
expression, it is the sign for rejecting it.’